The Windows 8 start screen has a nice looking app to display the weather.

You can search for towns and cities to add to the display. My home town (or even the nearest big town) doesn’t show in the results returned by the search. The nearest town I can find is 50 miles away. In England that can be a whole different weather pattern.

On a whim I tried searching for my post code – came up with the correct village and displays.

US zip codes also seem to work. Haven’t tried for any other countries so can’t guarantee results

The emphasis of Public is mine. We have a network connection type set to public. At this point I would normally be tearing my hair out because network connection types are the ultimate pain to modify. I have hated the things since Windows Vista. No more they are now a minor inconvenience.

There doesn’t appear to be any way to read kindle format ebooks obtained from other sources. In other words you are locked into Amazon

If you sync your settings between Windows 8 systems – seems like a good idea – then only have a single registration for your Windows 8 Kindles

Not accessible directly from the Windows desktop

One the plus side it seems to work OK and the reading experience is reasonable, but the inability to read other ebooks means I need yet another ereader. I decided to standardise on the Kindle format for my ebooks – may need to re-think that decision

Overall the Kindle for Windows 8 app is disappointing and a backward step compared to the Kindle for Windows 7 application.

Windows 8 Enterprise can’t do an in place upgrade of Windows 7 Ultimate. So had to re-install all my applications. Took the opportunity to upgrade to Office 2013 and Visual Studio 2012

Following installed and work:

Adobe Digital Editions

Camtasia

Snaggit

Live mail 2012

Palm eReader

Skype

Magic Disk is no longer required because Windows 8 can mount .iso files in the file system. Right click an .iso file in File Explorer and Mount is the first choice on the context menu

Windows defender now does Anti-Virus

The second machine was my Dell Duo:

Installed windows 8 as an upgrade to Windows 7 Home premium

Kindle for PCs doesn’t work on Windows 8. Download the free Kindle app from the Microsoft store. Its not obvious where the downloaded books are stored

The DUO is a hybrid netbook/tablet. The accelerometer stopped working post upgrade meaning the screen didn’t rotate. Not good for a tablet. Dell don’t appear to do an updated driver but a web search found the issue was fixable using the Samsung driver from http://www.samsung.com/global/windowspreview/

Running as a tablet swipe & touch all seem to work OK

One draw back to the Kindle app is that it only seems able to access ebooks through the Amazon store. With Kindle for windows PC I could add books in from other sources. Stopping this is a backward step. Luckily I have other means of reading those ebooks